I can tweak Linux by adding little tools, sure, but it's very useable even if I don't.
And sure, to some extent Mac has a different paradigm, and if you are used to it it won't seem strange.
But on top of all of that, objectively, the mac UI is still incredibly limiting and frustrating in ways that no other DE is, even with being familiar with it.
That really depends on what you mean by Linux. A feature-rich desktop Linux like Ubuntu, Fedora or openSUSE? These are comparable to MacOS: You may like the defaults, you may not, but the premise is the same.
If you’re using anything highly customisable, chances are you have to tweak the system, otherwise there is no system. E.g. Arch not shipping with X11/Wayland by default.
The MacOS UI is one of the better desktop environments I’ve encountered and I prefer it over almost any non-tiling desktop environment in Linux. Only i3, xmonad, etc. have a better setup, in my experience, but they require installing and customising.
> The MacOS UI is one of the better desktop environments I’ve encountered
See that's just hard for me to understand. At every point it seems to get in the way. Someone else in this thread made a list of the UI behaviors that they thought were odd, e.g. pressing enter on a file results in a prompt to rename it.
I think it's hard to measure and compare UI stuff though, because we become so biased by what we're used and what we find easiest or most comfortable to use.
Mac has defaults, and they seem off when you don't use Mac.
Once you accept Mac as your system, you either adopt those defaults or start tweaking them.
I think of Mac as a UNIX with an average window manager, but with excellent integrations.